ChatGenie is a multi-channel commerce platform that helps you reach millions of your customers instantly on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Viber, GCash, and other social media apps.
About the Customer
ChatGenie aims to integrate their single EC2 instances to a more reliable and secure cloud strategy and infrastructure. A partnership with Apper will allow them to benefit from multiple AWS services that may improve their security. posture as they may be able to segregate application environments across multiple Amazon Virtual Private Clouds. Amazon Cognito will be implemented to secure application users sign-up, sign-in, and access control.
Apper also employs the best practices for cloud migration and networking. With AWS Audit Manager, ChatGenie can continuously audit the cloud infrastructure to assess risk and compliance. AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail combined provides automated compliance checks and audit trails for improved governance.
Customer Challenge
ChatGenie previously ran some of their production workloads on single EC2 instances. When their website traffic and demand increased, it not only reduced workload reliability but also slowed down their main application, thereby affecting the overall customer experience. With this, ChatGenie sought to revitalize their cloud infrastructure that could segregate application environments across different Amazon Virtual Private Clouds while also improving user security.
Why the customer chose the Partner
We, Apper.ph are an Advanced Tier APN (Amazon Web Services Partner Network) Consulting Partner that provides professional cloud consulting services for infrastructure, application architecture, cost optimization, and cloud security. Apper is also an AWS Certified Partner, with more than 50 AWS certifications within the team to ensure that we have the right knowledge and expertise to meet the demands of our partners like ChatGenie.
Partner Solutions & Benefits
To better understand the needs and objectives of their business, Apper.ph undertook a comprehensive review and technical planning with ChatGenie. We then optimized their cloud infrastructure by enforcing the necessary AWS services. Here’s a summary of AWS services implemented by Apper and its benefits to ChatGenie:
Quantitative Improvement
Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Implementation – Using AWS CloudFormation to build an end-to-end cloud infrastructure allows application environments to be provisioned regularly without the need for user intervention. It reduced the work of provisioning resources in an environment from 1 week to 10 minutes end-to-end (about 1000 times faster).
Benefit: Consistent application environments reduce application bugs and cloud infrastructure errors resulting in increased productivity and better software. In addition, automated provisioning of resources eliminates the risk of human error and ensures parity of AWS resources between environments.
Scalable High-Availability Infrastructure Implementation – Previously, ChatGenie used single EC2 instances for some of their production workloads. Included in the IaC implementation are Auto Scaling groups (ASG) to replace these single-instance workloads, provisioning a minimum of two (2) instances and a maximum of ten (10) instances per ASG. This doubles the availability of ChatGenie production workloads and provides scalable capacity by up to ten times.
Benefit: This implementation fulfills the Reliability Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. ChatGenie production workloads will remain available even if a single instance goes down. In addition, ASGs allow for scaling horizontally based on server metrics (CPU and Memory utilization) or on approved schedules (upcoming events like Black Friday, Christmas) to meet increased demand.
Qualitative Improvement
Securing database credentials through AWS Secrets Manager – Through CloudFormation, master credentials (username and password) for application databases are generated and stored by AWS Secrets Manager. This ensures that database credentials are not hardcoded in any configuration file or application code and that applications can utilize the AWS SDK to retrieve the credentials from Secrets Manager to connect to the database.
Increased cybersecurity posture using Amazon CloudFront and AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) – The combination of Amazon CloudFront and AWS Web Application Firewall protects against distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) and increases website caching performance.
Increased operational performance through AWS ElastiCache – Using ElastiCache (Redis) for ChatGenie SideKiq processes increased the speed and performance of background processes, ensuring that the main application can operate smoothly and without interference.
Increased visibility of application and server metrics through Centralized Logging and Monitoring with AWS OpenSearch – With AWS OpenSearch and Logstash OSS, ChatGenie can push all their logs and server metrics into a centralized location for auditing and analysis. And with AWS OpenSearch Dashboards, these data can be represented by diagrams and graphs that reflect changes in real-time.
Here are the services Apper implemented: AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), AWS Elastic Compute Cloud, AWS Auto Scaling groups, AWS Simple Storage Service, AWS ElastiCache (Redis), AWS OpenSearch + AWS OpenSearch Dashboards + Logstash OSS, Amazon Relational Database Service, AWS Secrets Manager, VPC components and services (security groups, NACLs, NAT Gateways, EIP, etc.).
Apper.ph successfully delivered the best solutions to integrate ChatGenie’s cloud infrastructure. With multiple AWS services backing up their system, ChatGenie was able to seamlessly extend their platform and services to reach millions of Filipino sellers and consumers.